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Patricia T. O'Conner. Woe is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English. New York: Putnam, 1996.
Patricia T. O'Conner, an editor at The New York Times Book Review, tells us English is not easy, as languages go. It originated 1500 years ago when Germanic tribes (mainly Angles and Saxons) invaded Britain, a Celtic-speaking land already colonized by Latin-speaking Romans. Into this Anglo-Saxon broth went dollops of French, Italian, Spanish, German, Danish, Greek, and more Latin. Within a few hundred years, English was an...